Veteran of drama, TV comedy
In the 1970s, Segal was among Hollywood’s most recognizable actors
George Segal, whose long career began in serious drama but who became one of America’s most reliable and familiar comic actors, first in the movies and later on television, died Tuesday in Santa Rosa. He was 87.
The cause was complications following bypass surgery, according to his wife, Sonia Segal, who announced his death.
Sandyhaired, conventionally if imperfectly handsome, with a grin that could be charming or smug and a brow that could knit with sincerity or a lack of it, Segal walked a line between leading man and supporting actor.
To younger people, he was best known for his work in comedy ensembles on primetime network shows, playing the publisher of a fashion magazine on a titillation-fest, “Just Shoot Me!” and a frolicsome grandfather on a raucous family show set in the 1980s, “The Goldbergs.”
But decades earlier, when he was a rising young actor, a handful of dramatic roles placed him on the verge of being an Alist star.
In 1965 he starred as a conniving American corporal in a Japanese prisonerofwar camp in “King Rat.” The same year he played an idealistic painter in Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s novel “Ship of Fools.”
In his bestremembered and bestrewarded dramatic role, Segal played Nick, the young husband in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” (1966), adapted from Edward Albee’s grueling depiction of marital combat.
The film, directed by Mike Nichols, famously starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as an embittered, longtime campus couple who, over the course of a long, boozy night in which they entertain a newly arrived biology professor (Segal) and his wife (Sandy Dennis), engage in a scabrous war of words. All four actors were nominated for Oscars, Segal for the only time. (The women won.)
In the 1970s, Segal was among Hollywood’s busiest and most recognizable actors.
He starred with Ruth Gordon in “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), Carl Reiner’s outlandish and farcical comedy about a man determined to rid himself of his mother; opposite Barbra Streisand as a nebbishy writer involved with a prostitute in “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1970); and with Robert Redford in a manic crime caper, “The Hot Rock” (1972).